Charlie Jane Anders

Since The Originals
started airing, it's never been dull — the Vampire
Diaries spinoff has followed in the footsteps of its parent show, throwing
in plot twist after plot twist and betrayal on top of betrayal. But last
night's episode was the first time any of it felt emotionally powerful.

Spoilers ahead...

This show seems to be finding its groove, slowly but surely,
and since it's a pretty big hit by CW standards, it has time to figure out what
it wants to be about. Certain characters are starting to feel more fleshed out
and real, most notably the ones who didn't come over from TVD originally.

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The plot of last night's "Apres Moi, Le Deluge"
was pretty simple — everybody finds out Sophie dug up Elijah's ex-girlfriend
Celeste. And thenit turns out that if
the witches' "Harvest" ritual isn't completed, there will be a series
of natural disasters that make Katrina
look like a minor breeze. Everybody (except Marcel) gets behind the idea of sacrificing
Davina to complete the ritual, on the theory that Davina will be resurrected
along with the other sacrifices. But in the end, the ritual doesn't work,
although the city is saved. And it turns out that one of the witches is
secretly Celeste, back from the dead.

(Oh, and there's a lot of stuff about burying the Originals'
mother, to help complete the ritual, which will probably be important down the
road but isn't particularly here. And Rebekah continues to dabble in trying to
scheme, which is sort of adorable.)

It was an exciting enough episode, purely as another helping
of plot sauce. But for the first time, some of the characters felt emotionally
alive, and I started to buy into some of these relationships. Notably:

Marcel and Davina. Marcel doesn't seem to have anything to
gain from kidnapping Davina from Klaus' compound and preventing her being
sacrificed. He seems to care about her for real, and the bit where he
apologizes for using her as a weapon against the other witches feels genuine
and stark — and his attempts to comfort her as she dreams of the normal life
she can't have are kind of lovely. Given that the episode starts with her
throwing him against a wall over and over, the reaffirmation of their bond and
family status is unexpected, but all the better for that. And then she dies,
and he blames Klaus.

And actually, the scene between Klaus and Marcel is the
first time Klaus has been interesting in a while, as he talks about how
grief-stricken he was 200 years ago when he thought Marcel was dead. Klaus is
always best when he wears his heart on his sleeve (and worst when he's just
ranting aimlessly.)

Also, the Elijah-Haley relationship, which this show has
been trying to push for a while now, suddenly feels a bit more grounded. Both the
fact that Haley betrays Elijah and then has to deal with his reaction, and the way
that Elijah is portrayed as someone who
feels things very deeply and holds on to a few relationships — even with
people who've been dead for 250 years. This show has often shorthanded Elijah
as "the honorable one," which isn't a terribly interesting way to go,
but this glimpse of his slow broken heart is way better.

And Haley's speech to Elijah, in which she points out that
he made his promise 200 years ago and "I live in the present," was a
really neat moment. "I won't choose the dead over the living, so why are
you?" All of a sudden, the Haley-Elijah romance has a bit of a spark.

Oh, and I'm curious to see what it means that Sabine is the
super-powerful Celeste — especially since I saw mentioned on another site that
Sabine was the one who warned Haley's baby would destroy all witches.
Interesting to see where that love triangle is heading.

All in all, a major step forward for The Originals, towards being not just entertaining, but actually
affecting.